A/62/306 46. Beyond these initiatives, the Special Rapporteur wishes to emphasize that, in the final analysis, the global struggle against racism in society will give meaning, credibility and sustainability to the eradication of racism in sports. D. Field missions 47. The Special Rapporteur wishes to inform the General Assembly of his 2006 visits to Switzerland, the Russian Federation and Italy, on which he prepared detailed reports for the Human Rights Council. 48. He also wishes to inform the Assembly of his forthcoming visits to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in September 2007, and to the Dominican Republic in October 2007; the latter trip will be made jointly with the independent expert on minority issues. Exhaustive reports on these visits will be submitted to the Human Rights Council in 2008. 49. With regard to the 2008 visits, the Special Rapporteur welcomes the positive responses he has received thus far from the Government of Canada — for a followup visit — and the United States of America, and hopes that he will soon receive a positive official response from the Government of Mauritania, which has verbally agreed to a visit by the Special Rapporteur. Recalling that the Governments of India, Pakistan and Nepal have not yet replied to either his 2004 requests to visit or the reminders he sent in 2006, the Special Rapporteur wishes to refer here to his statement at the November 2006 session of the working group on the review of mandates of the special procedures, where he proposed that the Human Rights Council should consider imposing time limits on States’ negative or positive responses to requests for special procedure visits. In the final analysis, the continued absence of a response to a visit request constitutes an objective neutralization of the most significant dimension of the special procedures mandate: a visit to the country. This practice should, in any case, weigh heavily in the universal periodic review. 1. Mission to Switzerland 50. The Special Rapporteur visited Switzerland on a mission from 9 to 13 January 2006 with the principal objective of assessing the situation of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, as well as the policies and measures adopted by the Swiss Government to combat these phenomena. 51. In his mission report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/4/19/Add.2), the Special Rapporteur came to the main conclusion that there was a dynamic of racism and xenophobia in Switzerland. In this regard, he notes that although mechanisms and institutions have been put in place by the Swiss Government to combat racism, and although officials are highly motivated, this phenomenon is not recognized at the national level and there is no coherent and resolute political and legal strategy against racism and xenophobia. 52. In his analysis, the Special Rapporteur notes that this dynamic stems primarily from the existence of deep-rooted cultural resistance within Swiss society to the multiculturalization process, particularly where persons of non-European origin are concerned. In this context, Switzerland provides a particularly striking example of one of the underlying causes of racism and xenophobia, namely the politicization of identity-related tensions derived from the multiculturalization process. This 07-49048 15